Sunday, April 15. 2012

As promised in our prior article: ODBC Foreign Data wrapper on windows, we'll demonstrate how to query SQL Server using the Foreign Data Wrapper. This we are testing on windows.
As far as querying SQL Server / PostgreSQL goes, the Foreign Data Wrapper still lacks many features that the SQL Server Linked Server approach provides.
The key ones we find currently lacking: ability to do updates and reference a table directly from server without knowing underlying structure. That said
the Foreign data Wrapper approach has possiblity to support a lot more data sources with ease. We'll demonstrate in subsequent articles using the www_fdw to query
web services which we've been playing a lot with and the often packaged in file_fdw. Enough of that let's start with a concrete example.

Warning, this is not production ready, but seems like a very promising start and with more testing can become very robust. Although we are demonstrating odbc_fdw on windows,
it is supported on Unix via the UnixODBC, but the data sources you can query will probably be different.
I'm really looking forward to how the FDW technology in PostgreSQL will push the envelop. I've been playing around with the www_fdw as well and been impressed how easily it is to
query webservices with SQL. A very ah-hah moment.